Modern Times
1993
Lithograph 30" x 22"






















"Modern Times tells a story about the complexity of Indian life today with the medicine plant and pictograph which can be important to a modern Indian even [though] dressed in a suit with a briefcase-he may wear a headdress to dance on the weekend . . . . 'Apples' also means to Indian people that some have turned against the old ways and are white on the inside and red on the outside."

Smith calls herself a cultural art worker.  Elaborating on her Native American worldview, Smith's work addresses today's tribal politics, human rights, and environmental issues with a keen sense of humor.

LOOK AT THIS IMAGE CAREFULLY and make note of its content and specific qualities.

WATCH THIS and take notes:

Sandwiches (from the series Easyfun-Ethereal)
2000
Oil on canvas
10 x 14 feet (304.8 x 426.7 cm). 
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,

The photo below was taken at the Gagosian Gallery, NYC, April 2018.

Marilyn
1962
Oil and spray enamel on canvas
7' 9" x 6' 1/4"

Gallery label text from MoMA: 
"Screen icon and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe (1926–62) was a favorite subject of many pop artists, and she figures prominently in more than fifteen works in the Museum's collection. Here, in a tribute to the actress created soon after her death, Rosenquist inverted, fragmented, and partially obscured her image with a superimposed portion of her name. He also included a segment of the brand name "Coca–Cola," rendered upside–down in its trademark script. In pairing Monroe with this famous logo, Rosenquist was suggesting that she is as iconic an example of American popular culture as the ubiquitous soft drink."

Look carefully at these 10 Paintings by James Rosenquist - LIST THE SUBJECT MATTER THAT YOU RECOGNIZE

READ THIS article and take notes
Image below: F-111, as described in the reading and in this audio/video

Installation view of James Rosenquist: F-111 (1964-65) at MoMA. Oil on canvas with aluminum, 23 sections. 10 x 86’ (304.8 x 2621.3 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P.Bliss Bequest, both by exchange. © 2012 James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo by Jonathan Muzikar

Excerpt from http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/02/14/f-111-1965:
"A special installation recently opened at MoMA of James Rosenquist’s F-111, an 86-foot-long painting that the artist designed to extend around all four walls of the Leo Castelli Gallery, at 4 East 77 Street in Manhattan. Rosenquist began the painting in 1964, at a decidedly tense and tumultuous moment in this country, as the Vietnam War steadily escalated abroad and anti-war activism gained momentum at home. The subject, the F-111 fighter-bomber plane, was in development at the time as part of a military initiative that ended up costing $75 million; funded by American tax dollars, it was meant to be the most technologically advanced weapon in the U.S. Air Force’s arsenal. Rosenquist painted the body of the plane to span the work’s 23 panels, interspersed with spliced-in images of commercial products and references to war—fragments of what he has called “the flak of consumer society.” Through this expanse of colliding visual motifs, F-111 points to what the artist has described as “the collusion between the Vietnam death machine, consumerism, the media, and advertising.”

AFTER CAREFULLY REVIEWING THE RESOURCES ASSIGNED ABOVE: Answer the following questions completely and with specificity to the provided resources, previous Artist Spotlight information, personal reflection, and additional research as needed:
1. What was the CONTENT of Rosenquist's work?
2. Define the following terms: 1) New York School, 2) Abstract Expressionism, 3) motif, 4) iconography, 5) pastiche, 6) grisaille, 7) disparate, 7) banal
3. Explain what Rosenquist learned from painting billboards; how did his  career as a billboard painter influence his painting style?​

Jolie Madame, 1972
National Gallery Australia, Canberra
​Courtesy Louis K. Meisel Gallery/New York, © Audrey Flack 

STILL CURIOUS? You can see many more of her paintings HERE

Watch the first 20 minutes of this video:

AFTER CAREFULLY REVIEWING THE RESOURCES ASSIGNED ABOVE: Answer the following questions completely and with specificity to the provided resources, personal reflection, and additional research as needed:
​
1. Close has painted portraits for decades. Why/how has he not gotten bored with that same subject?
2. You are always encouraged to be original - to think for yourself - not to copy others' ideas. But you are also encouraged to know the art that has come before you. Close copied the work of Willem de Kooning directly, over and over. Why is this an accepted practice? What did he learn from making copies? 
3. Limitations encourage creativity. What limitations did Close put upon himself in order to strengthen his creative process and growth as an artist? 

a3 blackface #59 
2003
acrylic on paper
Unframed: 49 3/4 × 38 in. (126.37 × 96.52 cm)
VMFA, Richmond, VA              

From Artspace @ https://www.artspace.com/artist/iona_rozeal_brown

The artist Iona Rozeal Brown uses her large-scale acrylic paintings to wryly comment on the ductile and ever-changing essence of cultural identity, most often by creating visual mash-ups of two disparate but in fact subtly harmonious subcultures: the samurai and geishas depicted in traditional Japanese ukiyo-e printmaking and the contemporary world of hip-hop. Trained in the art of ukiyo-e herself, Brown pursues a transcultural aesthetic in both her imagery and her technique, mixing the racial, gender, and class issues in her subject matter with the deftness of a DJ.

A recurring character in Brown's work is Yoshi, a wise female war hero—sporting an afro and classical Japanese garb—whose enlightened state allows her to exist as a communicant between divinities and mortals, guiding those still on earth. The artist's paintings have been widely exhibited, and she received a solo show at Cleveland's Museum of Contemporary Art in 2010. In 2011 she was commissioned to create a performance for the Performa biennial.                         

From VMFA @ https://www.vmfa.museum/piction/6027262-53207104/

Brown—who styles her name in all lowercase letters— uses a3 as an abbreviation for “Afro-Asiatic allegory,” her series of prints and paintings based on the style of the Japanese ganguro (literally “blackface”) girls. These young women reject Japanese conventions of beauty— dark, straight hair and pale skin—by lightening and perming their hair and darkening their skin. a3 blackface #59 borrows stylistically from Japanese woodblock prints of the Edo period (1615–1868). Known as ukiyo-e prints, these popular, middle-class images depicted the shifting fashions and chaotic lives of the Tokyo amusement district. Brown, who is also a disc jockey, found resonances between the transience of the contemporary entertainment industry and the “floating world” of Edo Japan.

​(adapted from http://www.artelino.com/articles/van_gogh_japonisme.asp)

With the treaty of Kanagawa in 1854 between the American delegation headed by Navy commander Matthew Calbraith Perry (1794-1858) and the Japanese shogunate government, a period of 216 years of Japanese isolation ended. In the years following, huge numbers of Japanese artifacts and handicraft articles flowed to Europe, mainly to France and the Netherlands. The Paris Exposition Universelle in 1867 had a Japanese stand and showed Japanese art objects to the amazed public.

All things Japanese were suddenly stylish and fashionable. Shops selling Japanese woodblock prints, kimonos, fans and antiquities popped up in Paris like mushrooms. The Impressionist painters and Post-Impressionists like Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec or Paul Gauguin were attracted and impressed by Japanese woodblock prints. In 1875 Claude Monet created his famous painting La Japonaise, showing his wife dressed in a Kimono and holding a Japanese fan. 

The term Japonisme was created by the French journalist and art-critic Philippe Burty in an article published in 1876 to describe the craze for all things Japanese.

Van Gogh saw Japanese prints for the first time in 1885 in Antwerp and bought a few. In the years ahead he would buy many more. Japanese prints were cheap at that time. Many were reproductions made only for export to Western countries.

In 1886 Vincent van Gogh moved to Paris. Van Gogh's brother Theo ran an art gallery in Montmartre. He too brought Vincent in contact with ukiyo-e. In Montmartre there was a little shop with Japanese prints, called the Bing Gallery after its owner Samuel Bing. Mr. Bing kept thousands of Japanese prints on stock. The Bing Gallery was next to van Gogh's apartment and Vincent spent days in the shop and became an avid collector of ukiyo-e.

Van Gogh's admiration for Japanese art forms led him to paint copies of two famous designs of Hiroshige, the great Japanese landscape printmaker. These two paintings after Hiroshige are rather free transcriptions; Vincent added frames to the originals and decorated them with what he considered to be Japanese characters. And van Gogh's use of colors was not very close to the originals. Instead he used his concept of complementary colors like the green against the red.

"I envy the Japanese artists for the incredible neat clarity which all their works have. It is never boring and you never get the impression that they work in a hurry. It is as simple as breathing; they draw a figure with a couple of strokes with such an unfailing easiness as if it were as easy as buttoning one's waist-coat." In 1888 Vincent van Gogh moved to Arles in Southern France. He arrived in springtime and the strong colors and the light of the landscape gave him new energies. He painted continuously - landscapes, still life and portraits of ordinary people. The influence of Japonisme is obvious in his paintings. The use of black contours is a typical element of Japanese woodblock prints. It reinforced the expressive power of the paintings of his last 4 years.

AFTER CAREFULLY REVIEWING THE RESOURCES ASSIGNED ABOVE: Answer the following questions completely and with specificity to the provided resources, notes taken, personal reflection, and additional research as needed. Make sure to consider how this information is relevant to your current work and practice.
​
1. What event perpetuated the influx of Japanese art to Europe and beyond after it had been excluded from public view for so long? (after you write write your answer, just think about this....how fascinating is it that this political/historical event SO dramatically changed the art world???!!!).
2. List at least FOUR specific influences that van Gogh adapted from the Japanese printmakers whom he so admired.
3. Respond to this quote by van Gogh: "I envy the Japanese artists for the incredible neat clarity which all their works have. It is never boring and you never get the impression that they work in a hurry. It is as simple as breathing; they draw a figure with a couple of strokes with such an unfailing easiness as if it were as easy as buttoning one's waist-coat." ​

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa
From "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji"
1823-29
Color woodcut
10 x 15 inches
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

Takes notes on the following resources:

• FIRST, See the 36 views of Mount Fuji (of which the above print is one).
• THEN, watch a virtual demonstration of woodblock printing as well as etching, lithography, and screen printing (if the page doesn't load, try a different browser).
• FINALLY, watch the video below:

AFTER CAREFULLY REVIEWING THE RESOURCES ASSIGNED ABOVE: Answer the following questions completely and with specificity to the provided resources, notes taken, personal reflection, and additional research as needed. Make sure to consider how this information is relevant to your current work and practice.

1. What does Ukiyo-e mean? What are some characteristics of Ukiyo-e prints?
2. List and briefly explain the four types of printmaking as described in the virtual demonstration.
3. Give some examples to show how Hokusai's Great Wave and other prints influenced European art and artists.

Fish Vase
1997
Oil on canvas























"Over the last fifty years, Janet Fish has drawn on her embrace of change and her belief in the underlying interconnectedness of things to fuel her remarkable painting practice.  She philosophizes that to stop changing is to die, a conviction that drives her unending formal experimentation and her mastery of multiple genres.  Change inhabits each painting as well.  The objects that serve as armatures for color and light in her work are exuberant in their state of flux.  The long conceptual, formal, and iconographic history of the still life genre confirms our own experience.  Though the artist works against the idea of capturing a photographic instant, she preserves a mood, a quality of light, and a sense of place to which we can continually return."

LOOK at more of Fish's work from the DC Moore Gallery, which represents her (this is also where the blurb above comes from)

READ this: Artist Profile: Janet Fish (as you read, make special note of the many connections between Fish and other artists we have discussed).
​
WATCH this:

AFTER CAREFULLY REVIEWING THE RESOURCES ASSIGNED ABOVE: Answer the following questions completely and with specificity to the provided resources, notes taken, personal reflection, and additional research as needed. Make sure to consider how this information is relevant to your current work and practice.
​
1. The paintings of Fish and Cézanne are different  -  and they lived and worked at very different times in history. Still, they share similarities. Explain using points from the reading to support your answer.
2. Her work has been described as "photorealist" but she disagrees with this assertion. Explain using points from the reading to support your answer.​
3. The assigned reading, video, and gallery link provided many more topics than those addressed in questions #1 and #2​. Take this opportunity to explain what you found to be of particular interest.

Still Life
1955
12” x 16”
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

READ THIS article (and study the pictures) to get to know Giorgio Morandi and his fascination with still life. Think about HIS explorations with THIS subject as you think about what YOU want to make art about....

New article:  https://mobile.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/arts/design/19mora.html?

Watch this short video - it's an old exhibit but the info. and images are still relevant.

AFTER CAREFULLY REVIEWING THE RESOURCES ASSIGNED ABOVE: Answer the following questions completely and with specificity to the provided resources, notes taken, personal reflection, and additional research as needed. Make sure to consider how this information is relevant to your current work and practice.
​
1. Look carefully and thoughtfully at Morandi's work. What words or phrases come to mind? What feeling do you get from the composition, colors, and the work in general?
2. List the artists who inspired Morandi.  What did he take from these artists, in order to finally develop his own style?
3. He called himself a "monk" and others agreed with this nickname, also calling him a "zen master"....why?

CURIOUS? Here's more:
Morandi @ MoMA
Morandi @ TATE